Avid S6 the newcomer

Published October 7, 2014

Now it’s official. The Palace of Arts Budapest purchased two Avid S6 24 fader M10 controllers into two of its studios.

The controllers going to serve as the main post production helpers as well as in-the-box live broadcast controllers in the near future. This workflow is still being developed, but our plan is to rely more and more on the capabilities of Pro Tools HD and the S6. With Pro Tools 11 we can record the automation along with the audio which would result in a very efficient and fast workflow post production wise.

The planned live broadcast production would use a pretested master template which would include every channel strip, additional eq and compressor plugins as well as different sends and busses and reverbs. So basically, just as one would work with a digital console the Pro Tools session’s going to include every necessary thing for mixing duties.

Future plans

Now we are in the testing phase of the new S6 but things looks very promising. If they will perform as we except, the plan is to buy more modules and even change the M10 brains to M40s. It would be premature to say anything serious about the controller, let’s say that we are all pretty impressed with it.

To this date there are certain functions missing, but I hope that Avid is working hard to make this gear as clever as it can get. I just can’t help but compare it to the Icon controllers that still has very clever and useful features that the S6 lacks. I’m not a programmer so I don’t know what Eucon is capable of, but I’m sure we’re going to see some very interesting software upgrades for the S6 very soon.